Movie - Spider-Man 3 (C+)

Starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, James Franco, Thomas Haden Church, Topher Grace, Bryce Dallas Howard
Directed by Sam Raimi
PG-13 for intense action violence, adult themes, profanity

I had such low expectations going into this movie that it had nowhere to go but up in my book. I am a firm believer in comic book movies having only one villain - two at the most if it's handled exceptionally well. Beyond that the story always becomes a muddled mess with no character development and therefore no emotional stakes in the outcomes of the battles. The multiple villain approach helped kill the Batman franchise in the 1990s and it comes perilously close to killing this one. It has four: The Sandman, Venom, the New Goblin, and a symbiotic goo from space that makes Spidey evil.

But what really killed the Batman series was campiness - and it rears its ugly head in full force right smack in the middle of Spider-Man 3. Director Sam Raimi flirted with silliness in Spider-Man 2, when he built a Peter Parker montage around B.J. Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head", replete with a goofy freeze-frame finish that reeked of 70s TV shows. But the rest of the film shook that bit of misjudgment off as though it were just a momentary in-joke. This time around, Raimi indulges in a protracted sequence of events over several scenes that becomes more and more incredible and painful to watch as it goes on.

In this story, Parker is gradually transformed into a mean-spirited jerk by an alien life-form that has attached itself to him and feeds off his negative emotions. As this progresses, Parker becomes more selfish, narcissistic, and sadistic. It starts off with a believably uncomfortable callousness towards his girlfriend Mary Jane and a vengeful, murderous battle with Sandman.

But it immediately veers off into the ridiculous, starting with an extreme makeover of expensive European suits and an Adolf Hitler haircut (no lie), proceeding to Parker jive-walking down the street winking at women who are openly disgusted with him - all set to funky music rejected from a blaxploitation film. This goes on for some time. Then he blows off a one-ended phone conversation with exaggerated, cliche-riddled preening (and more winking) for a gawky girl. Then he goes to a nightclub and commandeers the piano, dances on the bar with super-powered computer-generated swings and flips right out of The Mask, and the crowd goes wild. Well, the crowd in the nightclub did. The crowd in the theater said, and I quote, "Boy, that was lame," and "This is getting stupid," and "That sucked." My wife had covered her eyes. She couldn't watch it anymore.

The rest of the movie was a B flirting with a B minus. But that sequence yanked it down to a

Final score: C+